Why a Libyan No-Fly Zone Is Worth the Risks

By David W. Brown

If the U.S. is to intervene against Qaddafi, the time is now

On Meet the Press this weekend, the White House Chief of Staff downplayed
plans for a U.S.-enforced no-fly zone over Libya. But the U.S. military
looks to be preparing for just such a possibility. Two U.S. Navy
warships with an accompaniment of 600 U.S. Marines are settling in the
Mediterranean, and the U.S.S. Enterprise lurks in the Red Sea. Most telling,
John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on
Face the Nation that a no-fly zone would not constitute military
intervention. The U.S. Senate has already voted unanimously in favor of
such a move.

General James Mattis, Commander of U.S. Central
Command and never one to mince words, disagreed with the senator from
Massachusettes. "No illusions here, it would be a military operation. It
wouldn't simply be telling people not to fly airplanes." Writing last
week at TheAtlantic.com, Edward Rees argued that a no-fly zone would be ineffective at stopping mass slaughter of civilians and risks quickly escalating out of control.

The
Libyan government, led by Moammar Qaddafi, is using its Air Force to
strafe protestors. Rounds from a MiG-23 30mm cannon do awful things to
the human body. This brazen violence against civilians suggests that
Qaddafi is not concerned with the United States and believes he can
slaughter his way out of defeat. A no-fly zone is gaining support
internationally as the civilian body count rises.

A major risk of the U.S. using air power is the temptation to overuse it. According to
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, "A no-fly zone begins with an attack
on Libya to destroy the air defenses." From a U.S. perspective, this
would obviously be preferable to the Marines adding a star to their
Tripoli battle streamer. But once the first U.S. missile strikes the
first Libyan target, the shock is gone and the stage is set for
continued operations. It's far easier to launch the second missile.

General
Stanley McChrystal, a classical liberal, was very sensitive to the
risks of air power. Upon taking command of NATO forces in Afghanistan,
he commented,
"Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction if we do not use
it responsibly." Throughout his brief tenure as commander, McChrystal
was criticized for restricting the use of air assets but he held firm.
As he argued in his counterinsurgency training guide,
civilian casualties have a far more lasting effect than do conventional
military victories: "This is part of the reason why eight years of
individually successful kinetic actions have resulted in more violence."
Last week, McChrystal was proven right in the most shocking of ways
when NATO aircraft inadvertently slaughtered nine Afghan children. The
dead were not collateral damage from a strike against terrorists, but
were alone, unarmed, and sent by their parents to chop wood for a cold winter's night. The people of that village will never recover.

If
it is the intent of the United States to use military force in Libya by
imposing a no-fly zone, the president and his administration should
make the argument now rather than later. Qaddafi is a madman, but he is a
madman with a well-honed survival instinct. This same Qaddafi in
December of 2003 admitted that his government had been actively
developing a massive weapons program, but promptly surrendered it
to President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.
Qaddafi further opened his borders to international weapons inspectors.
More astoundingly, he wrote billion dollar checks to the families of
victims of Pan Am Flight 103 and UTA Flight 772. He feared the Bush
Doctrine.

The Obama Doctrine, meanwhile, takes a clearly
different approach. Though he's followed through with the previous
administration's Iraq plans and heeded advice from Bush's generals and
Secretary of Defense on Afghanistan, elsewhere in the world Obama is
hesitant to pull the trigger, so to speak. The feeling seems to be that
Team America has done enough. This is, in other words, a humbler foreign
policy -- the very course of action embraced by Bush supporters in
1999.

A decade and two wars after Bush's election, Obama said in an address at Cairo University,
"I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in
recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in
Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be
imposed upon one nation by any other." This was a hard shift from the
doctrine of unilateralism, pre-emption, and Bush's argument that "The
defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom."

Obama said
of the ongoing Arab protests, "We did not see anti-American sentiment
arising out of that movement in Egypt precisely because they felt that
we hadn't tried to engineer or impose a particular outcome, but rather
they owned it." However, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak never ordered
his planes to bomb civilians. Libya is very quickly spiraling into a
situation where the masses may not realistically be able to "own" the
movement. If Qaddafi holds power, it would be extremely unlikely for him
to take an attitude of "water under the bridge" toward those who had
fought against him. There will likely be retribution of the worst kind.
Tyrants know the intimacies of violence. It's generally how they achieve
power, and invariably how they maintain it.

Even accepting the
White House argument that revolutionary movements don't want U.S.
involvement, a position echoed by many Libyan rebels, it is inevitable
that they will require U.S. support, if not the day before an autocrat
falls, then the day after. Timing is crucial if America's supposedly
odious, imperious hand is to engage unmoored states and fledgling
democracies. Ill-conceived elections need only happen once -- for
example, in Iran in 1979 -- and then never again. The fear, therefore,
should be organized extremists finding opportunity in chaos.

If
the United States is to bomb Libya, the argument must be made now, both
at home and to the international community, before Qaddafi can slaughter
his way to victory over the rebel movement. Such a public debate might
alone deter Qaddafi from further bloodshed. But if the U.S. is to stay
home, the president should explain why he is willing to accept bloodshed
that does not intersect with U.S. interests. That might clearly signal
to protestors that they should not count on U.S. assistance, and
possibly prevent the same massacre that befell the Iraqi Kurds following
the Gulf War.

If the U.S. intervenes in the ongoing revolution
in the Arab world, some will call these spontaneous and moving uprisings
the work of the CIA. But such malcontents will say that no matter what.
In the mean time, if the Obama administration is so committed, the
people of Libya need to know that on the other side of their struggle is
U.S. solidarity. And as "Colonel" Qaddafi's henchmen turn Tripoli into a
killing field, it's a safe bet that at least a few protesters wish the
U.S. Air Force was there to fire back.